With
by The Madmadam
Summary: He laughs a little to himself. Yeah, living with her is incredible all right. But he can hardly help the feeling that being with her is simply being. Droon, set after Road Whose Course Does Not Turn Back.


She isn't always patient on the days he just needs to lie on the floor and listen to "Starman" and pretend he's looking at pale-dotted night sky.

He isn't always patient when she can't keep up with what he's saying.

But they talk a lot about stuff like that, and work on getting it right over time.

Sonny feels sufficiently thankful that things are usually going well between them. With their interest differences—he smiles at the new assonantic term he's just invented—there are still some thought barriers between them.

And it just goes to prove what Sonny thought all along—that they aren't inherently different.

Right now, for instance, they're stuck in a locked classroom.

Without windows.

But instead of being scared they're both giggling like somebody gassed them with laughing powder because, gee, isn't it funny, just remembered, haven't had any time together since midterms. Living together doesn't provide any guarantees when both inhabitants are full-time students. Especially when Sonny's working on a PhD at Udub and has to commute every day to Seattle.

Plus Sonny pulled an all-nighter yesterday, and the coffee's wearing off.

"I am _so_ glad you're here." Nancy wraps her arms around his waist. "I really miss working cases with you."

"Anything beats thirty-page take-homes," Sonny replies, eyes twinkling over her back. "But if there were take-homes here as well as our apartment, I'd rather be here," he adds quickly.

Sometimes Sonny still feels like he brought an umbrella for a hailstorm that stood him up. Nancy knows most everything about him now. She's not going to bolt the minute he mentions aliens.

Stupidly, he used to have to remind himself of that all the time.

He thinks they've both been a little cautious coming into this, like they're tiptoeing, completely aware of their different interests. But sometimes Sonny relaxes without knowing it, talking hardcore Annunaki conspiracy theories at the dinner table. And on occasion Nancy relaxes, too, jumping into hypothetical rumination with a few proposed answers to impossible questions.

Soon he won't have to worry about offending her or being offended at all.

Which is great, since over time he's just too lazy to keep censoring himself.

Especially since now it looks like he never needs to worry about heated arguments. Nancy already knows how weird he is.

It's less difficult to be together than he thought it would be. Again proving that they aren't inherently different.

Except now Nancy's scrambling for a way out of here and he just can't bring himself to care, not after he's dragged himself through two exams, not while he's standing in a locked classroom that doesn't at all exude danger, not while he's in the presence of the one person he really needs in his life.

Nancy plants her elbows onto a desk and leans into them, huffing in frustration. After a few seconds, she looks up at Sonny. "Any ideas on getting out of here?"

"Wait for the janitor?" he asks, hopping up on another desk and yawning. "It's 11 PM. They'll be here in seven hours or something."

She shakes her head, causing strands of titian hair to fall out of her ponytail. "Not patient enough for that, and besides, this classroom is all but abandoned. Nobody ever comes in here."

"Well, great. I was hoping this wouldn't be easy."

Nancy laughs, surprising Sonny. She's notorious for her intolerance of bad work ethic. Most notably, his. "Is it ever easy?" she asks.

"Well, when you got stuck in that closet last week, you at least had your cell phone."

"Not my fault somebody threw me in a river and it died. Anyway," she stares pointedly at him, "where's yours?"

"Dead. It's here, but it's dead."

"You don't believe in chargers, do you?"

"No."

Nancy doesn't blink in all the time she's looking at him.

"Fiiiiiiiiiiine," Sonny relents. "I'll start hauling a charger around specifically for these occasions."

"It would help make life-threatening situations, you know, a lot less life-threatening."

"But you're like McGyver, right? You can make a bomb out of bubblegum."

Her stare finally ends when she blinks, but it's quickly replaced with another _look_.

Sonny throws his hands in the air. "Just saying."

"You're so lazy."

He brightens. "Thank you!"

"That wasn't…" Nancy sighs. "Never mind."

"Okay. I'll try to be helpful. For you. Sound good?"

"No need to put in a monumental effort."

"It is a monumental effort. But… does the credit card trick work from inside doors?" Sonny suggests.

"Hmmm. I don't know. Let's try." Nancy reaches her open palm behind her expectantly.

Sonny shifts from foot to foot. "I don't actually have any with me. They must be in my other bag."

Her shoulders sink forward. "Oh."

"I, uh, have a sticker. A really thick sticker. Will that work?"

Nancy turns around and pushes gently past him. "If only I could find something to pick the lock…"

Immediately Sonny springs to the darker side of the classroom. "Now that you've said it, one's probably here," he says knowingly.

"Well, I wish life were that easy," Nancy says with a chuckle, raising her voice so he can hear her.

"It is that easy!" Sonny replies. "Ever get the feeling that life is just scripted?"

"No, not particularly," Nancy calls. "Any luck on those paper clips?"

"Oh. Uh... paper clips? Haven't started on that yet. I'll start looking." Sonny is thrilled to not hear a rebuke. Finally someone understands that sometimes it's really hard to remember things people just said to you if you're under just the right conditions to forget it. He tugs on the drawer to a desk he's standing next to, almost hoping that it'll be locked just for the irony.

(Un/)Fortunately, it isn't.

That's the last thing he remembers before Nancy shuffles around to regard him suspiciously. "I don't hear you doing anything."

Quickly Sonny makes himself look busy. He doesn't know how much time passed just now. Maybe it's what his therapist called microsleep.

"In fact, I think I hear you not doing anything," she continues, weariness soaking through the edges of her jokingly reproachful tone. Sonny feels her eyes. Finally, after what seems like forever, she turns back around.

When they got together, Nancy almost entirely stopped scolding him. Three weeks ago she started peppering rebukes here and there. Now it's great to hear, mostly, and it validates his own caution with sharing abstract ideas he's only now letting go of.

Nancy herself doesn't need scolding a lot. But on the rare occasions she does, like every time she overextends herself, or the one time she got caught looking through a professor's stuff, Sonny gives it to her good. Partly because he's concerned. Mostly because he wants to. Although for every time it's happened recently, he wants to less and less. Sometimes Nancy gets herself into more danger than even Sonny likes, and for all her brilliance, she's still her own blind spot. He trusts her with everybody's life but her own.

And maybe most people are like that, unable to turn the eyes they see the world with back on themselves, but he can't love Nancy like she's normal. Not when she just keeps blowing his mind.

"Can we just scream for help?" He asks as another wave of exhaustion hits. "I'd rather have a sore throat tomorrow than have to move." His hand slides further into the drawer, mixing the contents together. Out of the corner of his eye he notices a pencil holder tip and spill its pencils.

Nancy snickers.

Sonny decides that the effort of telling her he isn't joking will put him into the sleep he's slowly been crashing into all day. Instead he sinks to his knees and scoots to the side of the drawer, leaning his head on the desk so he can look while he's lying down.

Something shiny catches his eye amidst the spilled pencils.

Puzzled, he digs his index finger and thumb past them. Something sharp juts into his finger.

"Ow," he says faintly as he picks it up. His eyes widen. Is his eroded mind playing tricks on him? He blinks.

Nope. It's a paper clip, all right.

"Hey!" he says, waving it widely in the air. "Look what I found!"

"Hold still and I'll be able to see it." Nancy walks his way. When he holds it out to her, she nods in satisfaction. "Thanks."

Sonny's a little disappointed in her response, since he's rarely the hero in the situation. In fact, he can't remember it ever happening before.

Then he remembers he's not the one actually picking the lock.

He shakes his head incredulously. So much actual work goes into investigations. How does anybody ever get them done?

Although one thing's for certain, he thinks as he watches his girlfriend jimmy the lock. Nancy Drew sure can.

He knows living with her is incredible, but somehow it never feels that way. It's just like she's someone he met so long ago he just can't remember it, coming back to his arms which he didn't realize were open. It'd be nice if it were that simple, Sonny thinks. He wishes he knew how to be with her right away so they could've saved the months of dancing around each other, saving Nancy the pain of the months he didn't call her, saving him from being twitchy the whole time in Norway and over again until he'd finally decided he needed to see her again.

But then he remembers.

He'd never give those up for the world.

For however much easier it would have been, he can't conceive of much better than Nancy up and kissing him with such literal force that they both almost ended up on the ground.

He laughs a little to himself. Yeah, living with her is incredible all right. But he can hardly help the feeling that being with her is simply being.

The door springs open. Nancy opens it and grins at Sonny over her shoulder. "Looks like we don't have to spend the night here!"

"And I was just getting used to my new home!" Sonny follows her into a dark hallway then outside. It's a starless night, nothing in the sky except wispy smears of gray. The lonely sight dips him further into weariness. "How'd we get in there?" Sonny asks to keep himself awake. It's a rhetorical question. Nancy's been on a lot of cases lately. He joins her on some of the bigger ones.

To his surprise, Nancy frowns. "I'm so tired I actually... kind of... barely remember."

Sonny doesn't think he's at quite _that_ point of sleep deprivation yet. He probably remembers. Still he's at 2% battery, and any high-process maneuver will cause him to crash. So no flexing the memory muscles for now. "Well. Then." He looks around the vacant lot, briefly caught off track. "Can you remember where you parked?"

Nancy squints. "Give me a second." After about half a minute, she gestures weakly in front of her and to the left. "Behind that tree."

"Give me the keys. I'm driving."

"Don't get us lost," she orders.

"I won't get us lost." Sonny rolls his eyes.

Then he remembers how tired she is, and he resolves to zip it on the way home.

She doesn't say anything for the next hour. Sometimes he glances over at the side of her face that isn't pressed up against the window. Once he looks while passing under a street light. The shadows under her eyes jump out at him, starker. He's tempted to pull her against his shoulder just so she has something more comfortable to sleep on. Sonny's glad she doesn't have to commute, that Udub Tacoma has a criminal justice program that she likes.

"Thank you," she murmurs, out of nowhere.

Sonny returns his attention to the road. "Didn't know you were awake."

"I can't count how many times after cases I've had to drive back so tired I can't even think."

"You can't even _think_?" he jokes lightly.

"It's just… it feels nice to not be alone all the time."

"Yeah, well." Sonny turns into the parking lot of their apartment complex. "Humans weren't designed to be alone."

"So now humans were designed?"

"You know what I mean," he continues, pulling into their spot and shifting into park. They're both too tired to debate.

"You know what's sort of sad?" Nancy continues, yawning into a laugh. "That's the least stressful thing I dealt with all week."

Despite his exhaustion, he immediately knows what she's talking about. "Tests _are_ terrifying, aren't they? Strange to think we put so much time in for a virtual reward, living in fear of a virtual punishment. All that stress for a grade." Drawing the last word out, he tilts his head back on the headrest until he's looking up at the ceiling.

She laughs again and rolls her head back and around to survey him, eyelids fluttering at half mast. "Promise me you won't let me quit."

Sonny closes his eyes and stays silent in the hope she's joking. If she's not, what is he supposed to do if something better arises in the future? She'd never forgive him then.

Nancy doesn't push the point, so he figures he's safe for now.

Then she doesn't say anything.

Is she asleep, or does she want a response? He's suddenly irritated by it because it's the fourth night in a row he'll be getting fewer than five hours of sleep, and damn it, everything is a big deal. This morning he spilled a drop of coffee on his shirt and had a spastic fit about it.

"You awake?" he tries.

"Yep."

Great. Now he's got to think up something to say. "Whatever's best for you at the time," he replies. "I'll be there to talk about it."

"I know," Nancy answers. "That's been my favorite thing about you as long as I can remember. Even when you were never here, you somehow always were."

Immediately Sonny knows it's the exhaustion talking. Nancy's not the type of person to wax poetic about anything, much less someone who's more or less driven her crazy for the past few years.

"I don't know what my favorite thing is about you," Sonny replies. Maybe he should feel like a deer caught in headlights at this point, but he doesn't. "It's kind of hard to tell when everything about you is my favorite thing about you."

In the way she squeezes his arm, Nancy doesn't even take a second to consider the possibility that he's joking. And at the same time Sonny realizes that he's finally done tiptoeing, too.

He laughs.

"What's so funny?" Nancy asks, relocating her head on his shoulder.

"Just that I realize I don't have to worry about you leaving the minute I show you even a fraction of myself."

Nancy pauses, blinking. "That is funny," she says. "I was just thinking about that, too. It's just… it's been so long for me. After dating the same guy for four years…"

Gingerly Sonny feels around the headrest for her shoulder and squeezes it. "I know. I was nervous, too."

It suddenly occurs to him that, Inanna, geez Louise, humans just weren't meant to be this honest, and the way she isn't saying anything is an immediate precursor to her coolly asking him to stop the car so she can walk home and pack her things and be out of there in the morning.

Maybe it's just the sleep deprivation telling him lies. He has so many random aches that it feels like the skin's been ripped clean off by it. And he was premature in thinking he wouldn't worry anymore. The vulnerability is searing his muscles.

Then he wakes up again and thinks of how ridiculous it is. He and Nancy still make as much sense as the first day he'd entertained the notion. When they're together, the world sings. On the best days, he even hears it.

And he knows what to listen for, too. Grandpa Jin made sure to expose him constantly to music in the days he was too young to remember. That way, when Sonny did start forming memories, music was present in all of them. He was always listening to it. All genres, something constantly playing. Jin taught him to listen for the best parts.

Those were great days, when Sonny's mother and grandfather could still stand in the same space together.

Sonny remembers the time the importance of music finally hit him. He finally had made the connection between ever-present and significant.

That was the day Jin convinced his daughter, Sonny's mother, to give Sonny an instrument.

His illness never bothered him as much as it bothered everybody else. Maybe he was just too young to get it. But to him, it was pain here, pain there, a lot of time in a room that smelled too clean, a perpetually sore throat from the tube they kept shoving down there for anesthesia for surgeries.

Family members made a huge fuss over it, apparently, arguing about what to give him when he was well again. And so the day he got back from the hospital, his mother told him to close his eyes. When he'd opened them, a new drum set awaited him in the open garage. And he got the strangest feeling stepping under the wooden ceiling, like he was stepping into the next chapter of his life.

Even now, a decade and a half later, he has trouble disassociating Nancy from the music coursing through him every time she smiles.

After weeks of considering it, most spent wanting to move on to other topics, he thinks they're a pitchless melody. A meeting place for snares and snapping fingers. Admittedly it'd be more romantic if they're another étude, which is what Grandpa Jin would have thought without a doubt. Grandpa Jin thought everything came down to the process of learning. And then he tacked on the process of learning _music_ and made it this lush, gorgeous metaphor, just like the kind of epic stories he told Sonny long ago.

Sonny relaxes into his internal dialogue. For a millisecond, clouds form over the swirl of stars in his eyes.

It's true that their song is a learning song. It'll always be a learning song. But it's more fundamental than just a string of piano notes, more of a deep ringing that no one can interpret. One people can't get notes from. It's clearly not an étude, and he's having trouble letting go of the possibility that it is. He smiles sadly. Life doesn't always come out as poetic as the stories it inspires.

Nancy's breathing starts to even out.

Vision blocked by the sunroof, Sonny remembers that they're still in the car and opens his door, tapping Nancy on the shoulder. "We're here."

"I know. I was just enjoying spending time with you." She laughs wryly. "The minute we get back, you'll have to work on your thesis and I have to study."

"We just have to get through two more days, then there's the weekend." Sonny watches her get out of the car and considers staying himself.

Then again, he's going to have to move at some point.

When he does eventually make the decision and get out, Nancy's leaning against her car door. Her head's tilted as she surveys a spiderweb, and her eyes have gone tranquil.

He walks ahead, slowly so she can catch up at a sufficiently sluggish pace. Once he stops, wherever he stops, he's stopping for the night. And as he hears her footsteps, he remembers that he doesn't have to worry about telling her how he feels anymore. At least, he doesn't think he does. He might. He might not. Either way—

"Sonny?" Nancy says to his back.

Something jams a hook under his heart and it ricochets up into his brain. There's something else in the tone of her voice.

And then he can only think of layers of feelings peeling and flying off, blinding him.

Maybe he said it too soon. But they were in a mildly sticky situation that he wasn't thrilled about. And instead of being helpful, he started blurting out declarations because at the very least that had to be _indirectly_ hopeful because it was encouraging to the person who could get them out because his mind had just completely gone blank after randomly remembering she'd just recovered the inheritance of three close siblings who were going to be separated in foster homes.

Anu, did he have any _choice_?

Somehow he can't manage to do anything but blink as his mind starts to spin off in circles.

Nancy breaks in right before it goes fast enough to make his head fly off.

"I love you," she says.

They haven't been saying it much since Sonny started the cycle a week ago. Now, hearing it for the second time, Sonny's heart drifts back down to where it should be. He starts breathing again.

They fall back into the rhythm of their relationship. He says something funny. She laughs. She kisses his chin. He kisses her cheek.

For better or for worse, he knows they won't be dealing with school tonight.

**Yay! They love each other! D'awwwwww!**

**Finally wrote a piece that's entirely in Sonny's POV! Yay! Besides which he's a writer's dream - so many colorful metaphors I can't get away with when writing in the voices of more sensible characters.**

**By the way, I feel just awful for romanticizing sleep deprivation. Don't lose sleep, people! It's not fun!**

**Inanna and Anu are both Sumerian deities****, so I thought it was appropriate for Sonny to use them as oaths.**

**On "Starman-" I've formulated a rather detailed analysis explaining why the song "Starman" is actually about Sonny's encounter with one of the Annunaki. Probably Enki. And the alien in the song is NOT Ziggy Stardust-Ziggy Stardust is narrating. Since neither the boy nor the alien is named, that's free to interpretation/extrapolation! YAY! I suppose it could also be Steve and Roger from _American Dad!_, but, dunno.***

***I'm vacillating between continuing to let you guys know how crazy I am and just shutting up and NOT scaring you away from my stories! While I don't believe in the Annunaki, the backstory behind them is fascinating. And as a writer I'm equally taken with good stories as I am with the truth. :D**


End file.
